


The Night Beyond the Glass

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: 10000-30000 words, 15000-25000 words, Backstory, Episode Related, Episode: s07e21 Lost City (1), First Time, Graphic Sex, M/M, Missing Scene, Season/Series 07, Sex, Sexual Fantasy, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-05
Updated: 2006-02-05
Packaged: 2017-10-04 01:28:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The missing time from 'Lost City Part 1' (between when Hammond comes by Jack's to tell the team he's been reassigned and the next morning when Daniel meets Weir), from Jack's point of view with italic sections giving Daniel's point of view of significant events in their shared history.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Night Beyond the Glass

"Stay," Jack said.

Daniel paused in the hallway, with his shoes in his hand, just short of dropping them to the floor to step into. "I'm not too drunk to drive," he said.

_"I think you've had a little too much," Jack had said, after the evening of beers and bombshells and cards and pizza, when Sam slipped out quickly so that she wouldn't be seen to be the last to leave, after Hammond said he'd drive Teal'c back to the mountain since it was on his way and no one else's. Daniel had taken the cue, as far as it went. He let the others leave with the assumption that he was going to sleep it off on Jack's couch. He waited. When Jack said nothing, just turned to the window and looked out into darkness past their reflections, he went to get his shoes._

Jack turned, dangled his Guinness, fingers loosely ringing the neck. The bottle was half full, half empty; half stout, half bubbles and spit. It was a weight assessment, not a visual. You couldn't see through the dark brown glass unless it was backlit. "Have another beer. Then you will be."

Daniel walked down the short steps from the hall, tossed his jacket over the near arm of the sofa. Flicked the lights off at the master wall switch. "Now you can see out," he said.

Jack turned back to the glass doors. Daniel passed the remainder of the last six-pack on the coffee table, came around the stuffed chair where Jack had sat most of the evening, and took the bottle from Jack's hand. He lifted it to his lips. Instead of taking a pull, he sipped from the rim, letting the dark, bitter liquid flow onto his tongue until it was a mouthful; stopped the flow by tilting the bottle against his upper lip while he swallowed; then let it flow again, another mouthful. Closed his lips as he lowered the bottle. Swallowed. His eyelids slid down as he drank. Because of the way Jack pulled on his beers, and the density of Guinness, and the way Guinness settled, what he was drinking was as much Jack's spit as it was stout. He licked his lips, twisted the rim of the bottle against his palm to wipe it, and handed it back.

Jack accepted it without looking, because he had been looking. Took a long pull. Said, "You self-righteous, sanctimonious, paternalistic little shit." Handed the bottle back.

"You're welcome." Daniel raised the bottle, sipped stout through Jack's spit.

_"Perhaps it would be best if we drove on," Teal'c said, when they came around the curve of street in the rustic development and saw Sam's Volvo at the curb in front of Jack's house. In front was behind, really; the garage was in the back, but the back was the street side. The front door was a side door. The deck was the front of the house, off the living room, looking out onto the backyard that ran down to the stream and the woods beyond. It was a cockeyed house. Jack had built it, begging the title of a fable or a rhyme. Only Daniel knew that. The house turned its back on the world on purpose._

_Daniel hadn't wanted to do the team-support thing. He'd wanted to keep working, where he was, in the mountain, where he could do some good. But he'd hit his third dead end. Teal'c had wanted to go to O'Neill's. Spend Saturday afternoon washing Krispy Kremes down with Jack's beer du jour and watching sports and _Simpsons_ reruns, the way they'd used to. Daniel understood; this was important to Teal'c. It was an homage to friendship. Elegiac, even. It had ritual significance. So he'd handed Teal'c the car keys. Teal'c had driven straight to the doughnut shop. While Teal'c was inside, Daniel had slid behind the wheel. He'd driven the rest of the way to Jack's. Pulled into the driveway, when Teal'c would have driven on, his compact Jeep Wrangler fitting neatly behind Jack's alpha-male macho-outdoorsman Ford._

_"No harm just knocking," Daniel had said. Meaning that if the house's occupants were boffing their brains out in the bedroom, they could just lay low and not answer the door and he and Teal'c would go away. He figured the likelihood of boffing was low. Went so far as to open the unlocked door on the heels of his knock, and call "Hel-loo." It was only a beat before Jack's voice answered, from the safe direction of the living room._

_Yeah, he'd been a prick with the "Are we interrupting?" thing. He'd had to bite his lip to hide his amusement when Jack cut off his extemporaneous just-happened-to-be-driving-by inanity to embrace the doughnuts; it was too bad, he'd been on a roll. Jack's relief had been palpable. Sam's sour frustration was her problem._

Jack retrieved the bottle before Daniel could wipe it, took a pull -- down to the dregs now -- and hung on to it this time, rimming it lightly with a forefinger. "So now I'm asking. And you're telling."

Eyes on the darkness that was resolving into a moonlit expanse of lawn and a silvered fringe of woods, Daniel smiled a cold, closemouthed smile that said, _Am I now?_

_He'd lain in Jack's bed, sweating through the mattress pad for the third time that day, shaking so badly the bed creaked, an ironic and bitterly suggestive sound. Jack had already held him in the shower twice, dressed him twice, poured fluids into him while his body excreted excess stress hormones through its pores, held him at the toilet for a piss too many times to count, held him over the toilet while he threw up what liquids hadn't metabolized into piss and sweat, poured more liquids into him._

_"It's what I know," Jack said. "Principle's the same, near as I can tell." When Daniel couldn't keep down the noxious sports drinks, he got potassium and magnesium pills with water to keep his electrolytes in balance; later it was soup and fruit juice and bananas. Fraiser had wanted him on IV fluids; this was Jack's proffered compromise, what allowed him to bring Daniel here, to keep his promise to see him through it. "I didn't go to detox," he'd said, back in the blur of time that was the previous day, or the day before. "Did it this way, back in the shithole I was renting. Usually doesn't stick, you do it like that, but I couldn't stand the tank, it was too much like Iraq." He'd talked Daniel through the hellish blur that was those first two days. Talked only about himself; not a word about what Daniel had done._

_Jack's hands had been everywhere, everywhere but where Daniel wanted them with a primal urge that tangled through things he'd felt since the first Abydos mission and would snap what threads of sanity the sarcophagus had left him if he let them snare him now -- when he had nothing, no barriers, no control. The physical affection had been overwhelming, unceasing. The rough hand stroking his head, the iron arms keeping him from shaking himself apart, legs sometimes too; the commando grips he didn't know yet then, the ease with which Jack immobilized him, the comfort of being restrained, locked tight, when his body and his psyche and his soul were jarring apart._

_Jack's hands had been everywhere but there. "That's one of the two things I can't do for you, Daniel," he'd said quietly, when Daniel was sobbing, mewling for release, any kind of relief. "I can't detox for you, and I can't do that." He'd been behind him on the sweat-soaked bed, both of them fully dressed. He'd unbuttoned and unzipped Daniel's pants one-handed when Daniel couldn't do it with two. He'd taken Daniel's hand and pushed it through the flap of his briefs, urged it to close around himself. "Go on," he'd said. "It helps. But it can't be me, it has to be you. Go on. It helps a lot. You're gonna want to do it as much as you can."_

_Jack had held him, tight, while he jerked himself, slowly at first because he was spastic with withdrawal, uncoordinated, confused; then faster as his body seized on the familiar motion, remembered it. He shot hard, sobbing, creaming the sweat-soaked bed, heartbroken because it shouldn't have been like this -- Jack's arm locked tight around him but the other hand fisted in the small of his back, denying Daniel's body's desperate attempts to thrust back against his hips. He'd never known if Jack was hard, because Jack never let them touch there; but Jack never let them touch there, and that told him what the answer was._

_It had helped. It had helped a lot. He'd done it as much as he could. Orgasm dosed the brain with endorphins and other sweet things. It was homemade methadone for the sarcophagus addict. It helped ease him down, step by step, until his body began to regain some equilibrium._

_That balance point, on the sixth day, was when Jack stopped sleeping with him. He'd lie on the bed, over the covers he'd pulled up around Daniel, until Daniel relaxed, until he couldn't help the sigh that came out of him, which he knew would cue Jack to leave and still couldn't stifle. Jack would pat Daniel's chest through the covers. "Have a whack," he'd say. "Go to sleep. You know where I am." And then he'd go out and sleep on the sofa, never bothering to pull the bed out. On the tenth day, he said, "You're on the couch from now on, Doctor Jackson. My back wants my bed back." By the end of two weeks, it was over. It was as though he'd just stayed overnight because his apartment was being painted. They never talked about it. There were dry, sarcastic references to the sarcophagus, later on, but those two weeks were never mentioned again._

_It was so strange that no one ever noticed that there was no hard liquor in Jack's house. Jack's house -- a masculine stronghold that oozed testosterone from every grain, that should have given a well-stocked wet bar pride of place. It was strange that no one ever noticed that the only time Jack knocked back a shot was when they were sitting at O'Malley's wearing alien armbands that made them feel invincible. But it wasn't strange. It wasn't the only thing that only Daniel knew about Jack. Sam had served under him six months and wouldn't have known that he'd been married, much less childed and bereaved and divorced, if the unity crystal hadn't forced the issue. There were a lot of things that only Daniel knew about Jack. More than Jack realized._

_He didn't know what that meant Jack might know about him._

Daniel was a long, long way from the abstracted thirty-one-year-old Jack had met eight years ago. A long, steely, dangerous way from that.

Jack took a second pull on the beer, and waited.

"I can't tell much," Daniel said -- twisting it, of course. The way he did. "I suspect some disturbing feelings, ignored in high school, wrestled with and mostly subdued over years in the military. I hypothesize some experience in mutual stress relief, probably during foreign ops, probably during unsanctioned ones when everything felt crazy and off-the-grid. You wouldn't want anyone else's hand on you but your own, but you might have done a guy or two -- no contact, just fucking. It would have been rough, fast. Efficient. Gun oil or some equivalent for lube. You'd never have been sure whether it was to keep them from losing it, or you. You wouldn't have put it to anyone under your command, so this would have been before you outranked most of the people around you. You never cheated on your wife, so it was also before you were married. Afterward ... As I say. I can't tell."

Close. As close to the bone as a bullet; Jack could feel it nick the marrow, feel the furrow it scored, like a notch on a gun barrel.

"As far as taking it that way -- " Daniel paused. "I wouldn't say willingly."

"I wasn't sodomized in Iraq," Jack said quietly.

Daniel's brows rose in a shrug that said, _Technicality_. There were other places to shove a dick to cause terror and humiliation; there were other things that could be shoved up your ass. Daniel knew that firsthand; Jack knew that Daniel knew he knew Daniel knew. Jack had access to the medical reports. Jack had talked to the medics in Honduras.

_Jack had lain next to him on the double bed in the run-down Tegucigalpa hotel, not touching him, not asking him if he was OK, not asking him to describe what happened, not saying anything at all. At dawn Daniel woke with a different pain, in his hand for some reason, and found it fisted around Jack's dogtags, twisting in the chain, pulling hard and steadily as though it would eventually come free by wearing through the flesh and bone of Jack's neck. Jack was watching him quietly, unmoving. After a confused, paralyzed moment, Daniel loosed his grip on the tags, eased the tension on the chain. "Why are you wearing these?" he'd whispered, because he knew full well that this hadn't been an officially sanctioned extraction._

_"So they'll know who I was," Jack had replied. "That's what they're for. I'll check them through with the luggage for the flight."_

_"They're not who you are."_

_"Yeah," Jack had said, a yes that meant all kinds of no. "Yeah, they are, Daniel."_

Daniel took the bottle from him. "Mind if I finish this?"

"Knock yourself out," Jack said, and listened to Daniel swallow the dregs. While he took the empty and stood it with the other dead soldiers on the coffee table, he said, "Teal'c offered, y'know. Warrior brotherhood yadda yadda."

"I hope you know what an honor that is."

"You ever take him up on it?"

"I'm not a warrior."

Jack tried to say _technicality_ with his eyebrows and didn't quite pull it off. "Still an offer there."

"Standing invitation. Different terms."

Their eyes had fully adjusted now; their reflection had become visible again, an overlay on the night beyond the glass, lit by photons that originated somewhere way back down the hall, probably the master bathroom, and bounced at oblique angles off various surfaces. Jack took a step forward, slid one door behind the other, sliding their reflections into themselves and away, opening the room to the unseasonably warm night. "Grab another beer," he said, and stepped out.

"Parabolics," Daniel said, following him with a bottle of Guinness, handing it to him to pop on the opener under the deck railing.

"Fuck 'em," Jack said. "Dead man talking."

"Dead men tell tales. Trust me. I make a living listening."

Jack pulled from the beer, hard, and handed it over. "So what do I have to do to get an answer out of you?"

"Ask me," Daniel said simply.

"Davis?"

"Wrong question. But no."

_He knew Davis was interested. He knew Davis could read his desire for Jack the way he would read an inscription on a stone. He knew it worried Davis. He liked Davis. There was an easy camaraderie between them that Daniel didn't experience with most military personnel. Two smart, nice guys who'd found something more important than ambition to drive them. They had dinner, drinks, that kind of thing whenever Davis was in the Springs. Then Moscow happened. Then the thing in the hotel room didn't happen._

_It could have. He wouldn't have minded, really. Someone he didn't have to lie to about who he was and what he did; someone who wanted him because of who he was and what he could do._

_But Davis knew. He'd looked at Daniel, when Jack gave the order to blow the sub; he should have blown the sub, he was the military authority there, it wasn't Daniel's decision. But he looked at Daniel. He looked _to_ Daniel. He couldn't do it unless Daniel gave the go-ahead. There was a reason, right there -- right there. For not becoming involved, that way, with anyone you worked with. Anyone whose life might depend on yours sometime. Except that his reluctance, his hesitation, had saved their lives. A few seconds earlier and there wouldn't have been anything for Thor to transport. It happened that way over and over again. But Davis shouldn't have deferred to him. Another time, a hesitation like that would destroy the planet._

_He'd told Davis that, in Moscow. They'd talked about it, a little, in hypothetical terms. Even though Davis knew, they couldn't talk about it in explicit terms. He'd cut that line of dialogue off, and it left them face-to-face, nothing to do but make a decision. All completely unspoken. Whatever Davis had seen in him, he'd nodded and gone back to his room._

_Daniel had wanted it. Badly. Except he hadn't. It wasn't the first time he'd felt that way in recent years. He just_ wanted; _he wanted something he could never have; it was a general, desperate, miserable wanting that now and then found an object to shift itself to. He was sex-starved and he knew it. He didn't mind growing into a solitary widower; he'd never marry again; but god he missed sex. Closeness, contact. Fucking. But when partners presented themselves, he didn't want_ them.

_Sometimes that made it easier. Less distraction in general, less temptation._

_Sometimes._

_Mostly, no._

Jack leaned on the rail, breathed in the scent of wintering grass, a whiff of Daniel's sweat, a stale astringence of shaving cream, the acrid dust of ancient paper and ink. A molar twinged and he relaxed his grinding jaw. Watched the definition of long muscle in his forearms rise to take up the tension. He listened to Daniel swallow. Felt it go down through his body. Carefully matching Daniel's earlier phrasing, he said, "You ever take it that way, Daniel?"

"'It'? No. Fingers, yes. Tongue, yes. Vibrator, yes."

For a sharp moment Jack was absolutely certain he was going to come. He looked off to the side, head angled slightly down. It passed. "'No' was good."

"No wasn't the answer."

Daniel nudged his shoulder with the hand holding the beer, offered it back; Jack was clumsy taking it, brushed Daniel's fingers without intending to, then took in that Daniel had choked up on the bottle's neck on purpose. A juvenile ploy. Effective. Electric charge passed across their fingertips.

"There were men at the ends of the body parts and the sex aid," Daniel went on. "Excluding non-con, those three times are the extent of my experience on the receiving end. I give really good head. I like doing it. I just didn't like doing it with people I wasn't in love with, so I stopped. That was all in college. Undergrad. The first woman I slept with was in freshman year; it was empty and disappointing. The men were the two years after that."

"You went to college when you were sixteen."

"Yes."

"You fucked a guy somewhere along the way, though."

"Define 'fucked.'"

"Entered. Penetrated. Anally. With your dick."

"Yes. That was someone else. Postdoc."

"Post which doc?"

"The third one. It was Steven Rayner, when I was working under Professor Jordan, in Chicago. When I was seeing Sarah Gardner."

"You had an affair with him? Or the affair was with her?"

"Neither. I was ... involved with her. More 'dating' than sleeping with. When I started developing my crackpot theories, she backed off. Used the excuse of a blown anniversary to end it. Steven was her best friend. We were almost inseparable, when it was good, for about a year. The three of us. He was in love with her, but he wanted me. Love, sex, and ambition were pulling him in three different directions. The night Sarah broke it off with me, he came to my office. Not quite drunk, not quite sober. You can guess the rest. You can see the parallels. Very overwrought. Peyton Place Meets The Mummy's Tomb."

"Tell me the rest."

Daniel sighed. "He handed me a condom. Said he'd already prepped himself. Dropped his pants, braced up against a bookcase. Begged me. Real begging. The really painful kind. I couldn't say no; that kind of primate presentation and submission is an intense turn-on. Plus, he was my friend, there'd been all the late-night drunken conversations about sexuality, we'd already been flirting with it, I knew he was curious ... I was tired, I was hurt, I wanted to help, I was harder than I'd ever been in my life, I made a stupid call. I rolled the condom on, I asked him about twenty times if he was sure, I tried reaching around and he batted my hand away. It would have creamed a shelf of valuable first editions anyway. So I pushed up into him. He _had_ prepped, but then he'd gone to tie one on. It had tightened up. I hadn't gotten any in a long time. I came as soon as I was in. He got really pissed. I offered to suck him off, I told him to give me twenty minutes and we'd try again, he said he had his own fingers thanks very much and what he needed was to know, _right now_, if a dick up his ass would make him come and I'd let him down the same way I always did. Selfish me. And that was that."

After a moment, Jack said, "Twenty minutes."

"Yeah, well."

Jack raised the forgotten beer to his lips, glugging down several swallows, wishing Daniel had brought one for each of them, sweet as it was to share spit with him and all. "You ever sleep with Carter?"

"No," Daniel said calmly. He'd been expecting the question.

"Then it's not the same."

"Did I say it was?" Daniel reached for the beer. Jack pretended to keep it away from him, made him reach for it, lean closer, without really thinking about it; gave it up without really thinking about it.

"I thought you might have. Slept with Carter."

"Nope. Talked about it. She doesn't think I remember. It's easier that way."

"Do you think she knows about ... this?" He gave a vague, general wave.

"Is there a this?"

Jack didn't bother to answer.

"No, I don't think she does. I think she's thinks it's cute that we flirt, because never in a million years."

Daniel had stayed where he was, more or less, after he had to reach over for the bottle, but the signals were all very clear. Jack could smell the fabric softener in his shirt, feel the damp heat rising off his body into the cool air. "So, no more 'flirting,'" he said, experimentally, his throat a little tighter than he would have liked. "No more dancing around it."

"Just not that same old dance." Daniel drank down most of the rest of the beer, tipping it up with both hands, his elbows on the railing.

"Daniel, were you molested in one of your foster homes?"

"Of course. Doesn't that go with the territory?"

"That was a serious question."

"That was a flippant but truthful answer. Yes. I ran away. I ran away from three foster homes. I'm good at that."

"Running away? Fuck off."

Daniel shrugged, with his shoulders this time. "I wasn't sodomized in foster care." He precisely reproduced the tone that Jack had used about Iraq. Natural mimic. "Inappropriate touching, they'd call it now. I was eight years old, it was supposed to be a permanent placement after Nick declined to adopt me, my parents had been dead for a couple of months. They had been very clear about what was OK and what wasn't. I knew I had the right to say no. I hadn't learned yet that sometimes you say no and grownups don't listen. In my experience they always had. So the foster-care guy, he was fondling my penis through my pajamas. I said stop, I didn't tell you you could do that. He gave me some line about a bedtime check to make sure I was all in one piece. I said please stop, he wouldn't stop. I'd been writing in my journal. I stabbed the pencil into his hand, _really_ hard, I mean I can still feel the cartilage give way between the bones, and I took off while he was screaming about lead poisoning. When the police picked me up two weeks later, I was living with a nice old homeless lady in Tompkins Square Park. I was actually very happy there. She was crazy and she did better with me to take care of her. She liked to pick up discarded newspapers in languages she didn't know. She was great. I still miss her sometimes. I used to translate for her from the languages I could read, and it was like magic. Her eyes would light up, as if I'd just proven that paper could talk and she'd been trying to tell everyone for years and no one had listened. I tried to find her, later on. Never did." He went tense, and whispered, "God, I can't remember her name."

"Jesus Christ, Daniel."

Daniel looked down at his hands, relaxed them as if willing it with his mind. "Anyway, that was when I still believed that my parents would come and get me. It was all a test to see how long I could hold out, how well I could take care of myself until they could get out of the mess they were in and pick me up. I ran away from the second place because of domestic abuse; I took their little girl with me, I can't remember her name now either, fuck. She got placed somewhere else for a while, not with me, and I always hoped she never had to go back there. It was bad. The place after that was OK, they had books and nobody hassled me too much in the school, but it was a temporary placement. I don't remember the next few very well -- I don't know whether I ever did or that's one of the holes Oma left in my head. I ran away from the next place because I was twelve and I was sick of other people telling me what to do and I decided to go to Alaska and learn Inuit. I think I was kind of losing it then. Puberty and general dislocation and fuckedupness, and by then I'd figured out that they really weren't lying to me about my parents, and I was pretty sure it was my fault that they were dead. Kids blame themselves for things. It's funny; I can know that, as an adult, and I can even make an intellectual analogy between that irrationality and the responsibility I feel for what happened to Sha'uri and the people of Abydos, but you can't reason that stuff away. I can still feel that guilt. I went exploring so I wouldn't have to feel it anymore, I suppose. Literal escapism."

"You get far that time?" Jack asked, trying for casual. Taking the beer and swishing the dregs around the bottom.

"I got to the border of British Columbia. Clear across North America. Pretty impressive, huh."

Jack nodded. It was more than impressive. He was more than moved. More than appalled at himself, for all these things he hadn't known about Daniel.

"The border guard busted me. I was hanging on to the undercarriage of a truck. They actually look _under_ vehicles at the border check. Go figure. They sent me all the way back to New York -- I was a ward of New York State -- and I was beyond pissed. I said, Can't you at least foster me to some Native Americans? The Shinnecock Reservation, or the -- Anyway, it doesn't matter, since they wouldn't, but I got placed with a nice couple, retired teachers, and that was heaven. They helped me a lot. I skipped a grade and then did high school in two years, mostly because of them. They were the grandparents I never had. They didn't have a lot of money but they took me to Egypt as a graduation gift because they didn't want me to forget my parents or where I came from. That's the picture on my desk. It got sad later, because they got sick -- I came back to Columbia so I could take care of them, did a master's there ... but people get sick and people die, it wasn't crappy needless violent tragedy like the ... other, and anyway you know the rest and I'll shut up now."

_Don't stop talking_. Jack turned to him, intense, overwhelmed, trying not to look intense or overwhelmed. _Don't ever stop talking to me_. "I don't know the rest."

Daniel made an _oh, puh-leeze_ face. "I got a bunch of degrees, I crashed my career into a mountain, Catherine Langford airlifted me off, I ended up in Oz."

"I don't mean that. Goddammit, Daniel. I mean -- " He didn't know what he meant. The rest. Everything. All the pieces of Daniel he'd never had.

Daniel didn't physically draw back, but it felt as if he had. "Jack. What is this?"

Jack didn't answer; couldn't.

Slowly, Daniel said, "I thought you wanted to fuck me tonight. Or at least make a more informed decision about what was worth risking your career over, in the event that you, you know, live. This is ranging a little far afield of sexual history."

Jack was facing him, one elbow on the deck railing, the empty beer in his off hand. He was breathing fast and shallow. His heart ached. His erection ached. "I want to know more about you," he said. He imagined he could feel Daniel's pulse through the pressure-treated lumber. "Is that a problem for you?"

Daniel blinked at him, slowly, as if trying very hard to bring him into focus. "No," he said, equally slowly. "But it's a problem."

Jack so didn't follow him that he couldn't even articulate "I don't follow you," he could only give him a what-the-fuck look that he knew was half-wild and very helpless. He was blindsided by feeling for this fucking _extraordinary_ man he'd barely known, and so hot and desperate that he couldn't think, couldn't breathe.

"I'm in love with you, Jack. I have been for a while. That's OK; that's not a problem."

"That's not a _problem_?" Jack said, interrupting when Daniel drew a breath. "I'm _dying_, Daniel."

"I know. _That's_ a problem. My personal issues are not a problem. You wanting to fuck me is not a problem. You could have had me a long time ago. If I'd understood a couple of years ago that that was what you wanted it might have saved us a lot of grief. But you can't ... "

"I can't what? What _can't_ I do?"

Daniel was frowning, eyes scanning Jack's face, trying to read him -- or reading him and not liking what he saw. "Jack ... " He shook his head, pushed off the deck railing. "Shit, I'd never have ... Jack, you can't ... _return_ those ... those feelings, it compromises ... you, the ... team-- The stuff we have to do, the only chance we have to save ... Earth, everything ... you .... is if the team ... "

Jack tossed the beer bottle off into the grass and turned him, pressed him into the rail. Put his fingers on the first closed button of Daniel's shirt. "Give me permission."

"Jack ... "

Jack unbuttoned the top button, then pressed it back through. "Permission. To open your shirt. Open your pants. Put my hands on you."

"Yes ... you've always had ... I've ... oh god."

Jack had finished the shirt after the "yes" and spread it wide. He ran his hands over the broad chest, smooth pale skin moist and soft with nervous sweat over muscle quivering with tension, feeling the hard buffed frame, the solidness of fragile flesh and bone, this body he'd protected and tended and slept beside and worked beside until he knew it as well as he knew his own, this precious fucking irreplaceable life he kept losing and had hardly even begun to understand, had never even tried, never even asked. He ran his rough hands over the bone and muscle of shoulders, pushing the shirt back, running up under damp armpits and crushed tufts of hair to feel the back of him, the flex and swell of delts and traps, trace a fingertip down the sinuous river of spine. He cupped abs under his palms, spanned the depth of rib cage, ran his callused thumbs across nipples that hardened to a sharpness, watched the slow flush spread up under creamy skin to creep into throat, cheeks.

"Permission," he said again, unbuckling the belt, drawing it out of its loops in a long hot friction, grinding his erection into the thrust of Daniel's hips, dropping the belt to the deck planks. "Tell me yes," he said, unbuttoning Daniel's pants.

"Yes, yes, yes," Daniel said, his breath coming in soft bursts that puffed against Jack's collarbone when Daniel looked down at what Jack was doing.

Jack unzipped, spread the pants wide, caught the elastic and pulled and pushed all the cloth down out of the way. Daniel moaned at the exposure and then said yes again, before Jack could ask. Jack took him by the back of the neck in his left hand and slid the right down over his cock, smearing an unexpected load of precome down with his palm.

Daniel groaned. "Yes," he said, his head coming up, "but I -- I haven't -- I won't be able -- "

Jack pressed in, pumping fast, gripping hard. "Come," he said, driving his mouth in hot and close against Daniel's ear. "Fast. Hard. Now."

"Ohgodohgodohgod -- " Daniel's head went back, his eyes went soft and misty and shocked, his fingers clawed into the railing, his body arched bare and muscular and trembling out of its loose drape of clothes. His cock burst inside Jack's fist on its upstroke, so that Jack was pumping down through Daniel's semen, fast and slick into spurting pulses. He'd stood out of the line of fire, but come splattered the deck. Christ he shot hard. Jack lost his breath, watching Daniel come. It was fierce and innocent and the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, and he'd had no idea, no idea what it would mean to him, even though there'd been times he was half insane with lust and times he thought his heart would break just watching Daniel sleep.

"Unh," Daniel said, his head dropping, his eyes trying to focus. He winced, gave up, let them slide closed. "Ah, ah, _unh_ ... "

Jack slid his arm down for support, though Daniel was holding himself up, just barely, weight sagging on his railing-braced palms. He stroked, gently, through come. Daniel moaned, shuddered. His cock was still more than half hard. If he thought Daniel could support his own weight that long, he'd kiss his knees good-bye and drop down and suck him, and that was a thing he never did, would never have done, had never dreamed of doing until he started dreaming it about Daniel. He swallowed, his throat thickening with desire to taste what was on his hand.

The pants had to come up or come off. He went to toe one of Daniel's loafers off and remembered that he was still in his socks.

"What now?" Daniel said, pushing up, looking like he was trying to clear his head.

"Step out of all that," Jack said, catching some fabric underfoot to help him.

Daniel pulled one leg out, then the other, easing up on his arms, standing solidly with his butt against the railing.

_Aw, fuck it,_ Jack thought, and stepped around in front of him, and went down.

"Oh my god," Daniel said. His hands went reflexively to Jack's head. They didn't push him off. They trembled, then stroked into his hair.

Jack's mouth sank over a sticky alkaline sweetness of come. The first shock of taste jolted him, but it was only sweetness, only Daniel, sensitive and trembling after orgasm, this was known, this was safe, this was loved. He sucked his way gently down to the base and stroked along the shaft and head with his tongue. God it was good. It was sweet. It was Daniel. It was intensely intimate, dizzying; it was humiliating to be on his knees. It was painful to be on his knees. It was useless, a stupid gesture, it defied the biological fact of refractory periods; it was delicious and he'd suck on this as long as Daniel could stand the chilly air, as long as it took. He got lost in what he was doing, transported by the swell of flesh on his tongue, the aching answering swell in his already straining, confined cock; his tactician's mind considered twofers, thought back on the few he'd had, remembered being half-hard like this and coming again, reconstructed the circumstances. He lost track of time, which never happened either. He lost himself in the strange, close privacy of sucking Daniel.

When he heard Daniel stutter, "J-Jack you don't, you don't haaaaaaa," he knew he'd made the right call. He sucked tenderly, twisting his head, a bobbing corkscrew. Daniel's cock contracted in his mouth. Barely a trickle. He _didn't_ want to swallow it; he wanted to hold it between his tongue and palate and roll it around and taste it, taste Daniel in it.

He held the softening cock in his mouth, moaned on it, stroked up over Daniel's hipbones, stroked into the hollows of them with his thumbs. Finally slid his mouth up off the limp sweetness and let it fall, resisted the urge to kiss it. Pressed his forehead into Daniel's lower belly and just rested. Shivered under the light, convulsive combing of fingernails through his hair.

"Crap," he said after a while, on general principles, and huffed out a laugh that sounded strange even to him, lifting and sitting back painfully on his heels.

Daniel murmured his name. He didn't seem to realize he'd done it. Jack found him looking down, hands dropped loose against his thighs, his expression soft with awe and a gentle echo of the misty shock in his eyes when he came. The shirt draped loose just off his shoulders; dressed in nothing else but his socks, mussed and blurry, his glasses sliding down his nose, he was achingly beautiful. The sight burned steadily through Jack's retinas into his brain, something to hold on to forever. _Now it doesn't matter if they have _Hustler_ in Hell_, he thought, and smiled, and squeezed Daniel's shin, and reached for the nearest chair to try to haul himself up. His knee was shrieking.

Daniel half bent, half squatted, and lifted him under the arms as he pushed up. He came up easily, like floating, levitation. It brought them face-to-face. He slid Daniel's glasses back up his nose. Daniel tilted his head, and swiped his tongue across Jack's lips. Jack opened his mouth to say something, and Daniel's tongue licked into his mouth. It was a lick, not a kiss; a stolen swipe at his own come, an erotic caress, a startlingly sexual penetration. Daniel drew back, blurry eyes fixed somewhere past the center of Jack's face, and worked his tongue around inside his own closed mouth, and swallowed.

Jack's mouth was still open. "Oh-kay," he said slowly, when he could make it form words. Then he couldn't think of anything clever to follow up with.

Daniel shivered, hard, and looked around, probably for his clothes. Jack pulled him in close, squeezed tight, rubbed his back briskly. This he knew how to handle. "Bed," he said.

Daniel followed him, groping up clothes, and stood looking a little lost as Jack slid the door back into place and locked it. "I should go," he said.

"No way," Jack said. "Bed. You know where it is."

Daniel moved up the stairs into the front hall, and then waited while Jack closed up the house, checking and locking. Jack swept him under an arm and urged him the rest of the way. In the bedroom, Daniel balked. Jack left him and moved to turn the covers down.

"Jack it's OK," he said. "Let me just -- I'm just cold, I'm gonna get dressed, then -- "

"Are you having a thing because of the time you stayed here before?" Jack said, stripping down.

Daniel hesitated. "No."

"'Cause really, I did change the sheets." He got into the bed, slid over to make room.

"Jack, you don't have to do this. I'll make coffee, you can grill me on how I masturbate or something equally titillating and then when you're ready I'll blow you and I'll go."

"Do you want to go?"

Daniel gave a harsh sigh. "No."

_Are you afraid of me?_ His throat closed on the words. Fingers, tongue, vibrator. Nicaragua. His chest hurt. _Get your ass into the bed, Daniel. Nothing goes into it you don't want to._ He couldn't. But he couldn't coax. _Here, Daniel. Warm blankets, Daniel. Body heat, Daniel._ He swung his legs over and scooched to the edge. No, he wasn't going to pat the goddamn mattress beside him. Daniel was standing clutching his damn pants; one leg had pulled through the briefs. Jack got up, closed the distance, put his hands on the bundled clothes. Waited. When Daniel gave them up, he dropped them on the chair and opened his arms. All Daniel had to do was lean forward.

When he did, the contact of bare skin was electric, warming rapidly into wonderful. Jack curled an arm around Daniel's arm and as far around his back as it would go. He cupped a hand behind Daniel's head. "It's just me," he said, a ruffle of breath on the hair behind Daniel's ear.

"This is a bad idea," Daniel said quietly, as his shakes eased off. He'd been freezing cold. Fucking martyr. His arms closed slowly around Jack's waist.

"If you're worried about surveillance, I hate to break it to you, but the damage is _way_ done. And somebody'll make a mint off it on the Internet, and I won't see a cent 'cause I'll be in the big house. I'll follow your porn career through the tabloids." He drew back enough to see that Daniel wasn't smiling. He was thinking. The blue eyes were clear, serious, focused. "Daniel," he said. "I want you to sleep with me tonight. Please get into the bed."

"I wasn't expecting this," Daniel said.

"I wasn't planning it. Here we are. Deal."

"This will ruin you."

"Let's talk about it in bed."

"Bed changes everything."

"It's already changed."

Daniel drew his hand around and laid it on Jack's chest, where his dogtags would have been if he were on duty. He rubbed into the hair. "What I'm extrapolating to can't happen."

"Do you want it to?"

"Yes."

"So we'll make it happen. I've risked my life for less. Whole lot of times."

"Fuck, Jack."

"Said the right thing?"

"Yes. Don't do that."

Jack shifted them a step toward the bed, then another. It _was_ like a dance. Maybe even the same old dance. Just finally in the right direction. Daniel let himself be drawn, fingers still rubbing. Jack's calves came up against the bed. "If this can't happen, why didn't you stop me on the deck?"

"I decided to trust your judgment."

"That's a new one."

"Yeah. Every now and then. You know."

"Now? Could now be a now?"

Daniel bent his head and closed his lips over Jack's collarbone. Sucked, tasting him. _Oh please let now be a now._ One hand splayed on the small of his back, the other on his chest. He moved his mouth outward along the bone, then up to the pulse point in the hollow of the throat. Sucked, with a deep delve of tongue. Breathed deeply, inhaling Jack's scent. Jack could smell his shampoo, something appley, and a whole lot of Daniel. "Mm-hm," Daniel murmured, a low vibration of sound into his neck, and pressed on his chest.

He sank down, and back. There was never a graceful way to do this. Usually better for everybody to just get into the bed and then get the mood back. But with Daniel somehow it was graceful. Easy.

The twinge in his knee eased as soon as his butt took his weight. He lay down and Daniel came with him, propped on an elbow and a hip, mouth never losing contact with Jack's neck, Jack's shoulder. Jack elbowed back, pushing up from his feet on the floor, sometimes long legs came in handy; Daniel came with him, hand exploring. Once his legs came up he had to scooch, a slow wriggle. Daniel's mouth moved down over where his fingers had rubbed, and he rubbed with his tongue.

They ended up perpendicular to the orientation of the bed, Jack's body lying along the rumple of covers. Daniel's open mouth covered his right nipple; he felt warm, damp breath, then a tongue tip. He let out a sound. Jesus. He never cared much for that when women did it, but the touch of Daniel's tongue arrowed straight down into his groin.

He started to harden again. The warm sweep of Daniel's palm between his legs confirmed it and encouraged it. He cocked his thigh open, and gritted his teeth when Daniel's fingers played over his balls, under them, found the sweet spot just behind.

"OK, Jack?" Daniel murmured, against his nipple. The gust of breath and the movement of lips forming words made him shiver into a higher state of arousal. "OK to touch you like this?"

"Blanket permission," Jack managed. His throat was tight. No one had touched him in a very, very long time. "Carte blanche."

The curve of Daniel's smile against his nipple might have been the most erotic thing he ever felt. "Tish, that's French," Daniel said, and pressed his tongue in hard, and sucked.

Jack arched with a groan. Daniel's hand came up to the other nipple, teasing with light, circular strokes of the pad of a fingertip, then pinching. Jack groaned louder, heat flooding his lower body. If Daniel touched his cock again he'd shoot all over him.

He managed to tell Daniel that, somehow, although his brain was twisting with a hot wrench of jealousy at the guys Daniel had learned this on. He wasn't usually jealous that way. It was twenty years ago. But the twisting heat was there. He wished he were the first. He wanted to be the first. _He's mine_ \-- the thought was fierce, startling. It had been there all along, unrecognized, intense and unacknowledged. Every mission, every meal in the mess, every briefing, a low hard hot undercurrent, _mine mine this one's mine_ \-- and he understood it only now, when he was waiting to do his thing again: save the world and die.

Daniel's hand squeezed his inner thigh just below the groin, thumb rubbing sensuous circles. He traced the line of a rib with his tongue, and said, "I won't touch your cock again. I'm going to suck you."

Jack was trying to lie passively, but his hand moved up Daniel's neck, nails combing down through the angled shave of hairline. Daniel shivered, and his lips smiled against Jack's belly.

"This isn't thanks-and-goodnight," Jack said. "You're not blowing me and leaving."

"No," Daniel said into his navel, and "Staying," Daniel breathed onto the head of his cock.

He came with a hot jolt the moment Daniel's mouth closed over him. Daniel kept sucking him, swallowing smoothly, confident and focused and intent. Jack felt his testicles rolled and squeezed, rhythmically, and he spasmed into a last, hard spurt when a finger pressed up hard into his perineum, driving a spike of stimulation through his prostate. Daniel kept sucking, more and more gently as he softened; sucking and swallowing until he was empty and clean and all that was left on him when Daniel drew away, in one long languorous wet slide of lips, was a cooling sheen of Daniel's saliva.

"Daniel," he breathed. _Baby if they knew you could do this there'd be a sign-up sheet on the messroom wall, there'd be bidding, there'd be an auction, second mortgages, there'd be a freaking riot_. "Danny ... "

Daniel stroked his face. His fingers were still warm from Jack's crotch. Jack smelled himself. He wanted to rub that smell all over Daniel, mark him.

"You want to savor the afterglow without a hassle, or can I cuddle in?" Daniel said, voice low and warm and straightforward.

Jack managed to lift his right arm up a little along the mattress. His knuckles brushed a pillow, but he was too limp to do anything about pulling it over. "Cuddling's good," he said. "Cuddling's nice. I didn't think there'd be cuddling." He closed his arm around Daniel, the solid muscled bulk of him, as he tucked down on his side and slid limbs over Jack, across him, around him. "God, Daniel."

"Yeah." Daniel smiled. He started to stroke the other side of Jack's collarbone, then reconsidered and laid his hand flat and warm over Jack's heart. Jack felt his heartbeat echo back from Daniel's palm.

"Stroking's good too," Jack said. "I like stroking. Lots of stroking."

"You're hypersensitized."

"I'll live with it. Stroke."

Daniel stroked him for a long time, gentle swirling brushes of all five fingers. Throat, chest, nipples; down his side, over his hip, around his belly; long light strokes down the soft skin on the inside of his far arm. Ear, lips. He had the perfect touch, never verging on ticklish, always just enough pressure. Jack basked in the warm weight on one side, the delicious stroking on the other. A long, long time since he'd had this sort of contact.

"Daniel, how turned on are you right now?"

"Very," Daniel said calmly. "Still a ways from getting hard again though."

"Because there's something ... " He winced. God, he sucked at this. He didn't know how.

"Don't worry about it. Whatever. Whenever."

"This is important."

"OK." Daniel stroked up into his chest with his whole hand, and pressed it there, warm, easy. Waiting.

"Daniel ... " Jack grunted, as though he were trying to push the words out of himself. He turned onto his side, put his hand on Daniel's face. Blinked in a distracted sort of surprise to realize Daniel was still wearing his glasses, he'd had them on this whole time, somehow they hadn't gotten in the way. Found him so _Daniel_, so purely and completely the Daniel he'd known all these years, that all of it just welled up inside him and he couldn't do this, he couldn't hold back, play it cool, think it through anymore. "Oh, crap," he breathed, and pushed his mouth into Daniel's.

The buffered shock of lips on lips was like falling, from a good fifty or sixty feet, into a deep impact bag. Stomach-dropping rush. Vertigo. Free fall. Euphoria. _Flying_. Cringing, the imminence of hard ground, _maybe this wasn't such a good idea_. Landing, hard, satisfying. The forceful exhale to keep the wind from being knocked out. Firm cushion; safety. Good fall. Daniel's lips were chapped satin, soft and full, a bounty of lips, a feast, more lips than he'd ever felt.

"Mmf," Daniel said, "mmmf, _mmmrff_, Ja', _kiss_'ng, ungh, unnhh ... _unnnnhh_ ... "

Daniel's mouth yielded, warm and wet, rich with coffee and Guinness and come, full of tongue, a surge of tongue, a hungry submission. The hand he'd been waving frantically just shy of Jack's face fell limp onto Jack's shoulder, then slid down his back, dug in.

Jack rolled on top of him, devouring the depths of wet warmth, tasting himself, tasting Daniel. Working his jaw, working him wide, thrusting deep with his tongue, stroking uvula, trying for tonsils. Working him too hard to let him swallow, working the spit around, mixing it, sucking on it, sucking his tongue in. A graze of teeth as Daniel pulled it back -- that got a ragged moan, a thrust; he drew back, swallowed, then pressed again, levering him open, plundering that incredible, hot, wet, complex space.

The big body arching under his made him ravenous. He groped back for Daniel's hands, pushed his arms over his head, leaned on them. Daniel groaned, deeper this time, a sexual near-growl, and arched and thrust underneath him, a long rippling undulation of spine and muscle. His calves slid behind Jack's knees, locking Jack's legs, spreading Daniel's; Jack felt him hardening, and thrust his groin into it, rubbing his soft, heavy cock and balls into that hardness. Daniel flushed from scalp to toes, moaned; his mouth went soft, completely passive, but his legs locked down hard and tight and he thrust with supple, muscular insistence.

Jack stroked the roof of Daniel's mouth with his tongue, licked behind his teeth, in front of them. Sucked his lips, top and bottom. He drew his head up, panting, to look at Daniel pinned and writhing under him, the sculpted features flushed and slack, dark crescent lashes behind the lenses, parted lips swollen, glistening. Sipped from the puffs of hot breath, ran his tongue along the top lip, the bottom lip; took the bottom in his teeth and tugged off it in a long slide, looked down again to see it flush and swell.

Daniel was moaning in earnest now, wincing a little; his thrusts were urgent, demanding, but he didn't try to pull his arms down. Jack leaned harder on them, and Daniel's mouth opened, his neck arched; Jack pushed up, putting his weight on Daniel's wrists, and watched the flush deepen, felt the balls under his tighten.

_Huh_, he thought. _OK._

He forced Daniel's legs open wide, jamming his knees up under his thighs, and pushed his face down into Daniel's neck, made him turn his head, expose the carotid artery and stretch the long tendon tight. He bore down between Daniel's spread legs, working his pubic bone against the rigid cock. He gave a hard shove on the crossed wrists, closed his teeth around the straining tendon, and bit down.

Daniel convulsed under him. Jack felt the first shot as an impact on his skin. He bore down heavily with weight and muscle, jamming his knees up tighter under Daniel's thighs to deny him leverage, pinned him hard while he bucked. The only sound Daniel let out was something like a whimper, a catch in the back of his throat in the middle of rasping, uncontrolled gasps.

When the violent eruption began to calm, Jack hiked up and rubbed his genitals into the last tremulous spasms of ejaculation, rubbing himself into come and Daniel's cock and down into Daniel's balls. He sucked the spot he'd bitten, then kissed it, hard, and moved his mouth up to claim Daniel's, to lick and suck the trembling soundless communication of subsiding climax, to taste the pleasure and amazement. Daniel started to respond a little, kiss him back; he released Daniel's wrists, but Daniel's arms stayed over his head, limp, and his legs stayed spread.

"Mine," Jack said softly, into Daniel's mouth. "Mine," he said, more firmly, into Daniel's lips.

"Yes," Daniel's lips murmured back, and then his body rose through a trembling shudder, an orgasmic aftershock, and he said, "Oh god Jack, please get hard, I really _really_ want you to fuck me right now."

"Would if I could, Daniel," he said tightly. He wanted to say _Shhhh_, nuzzle into the side of his face. He stopped himself out of very old, long-standing habit. Never push too much affection on Daniel. God, he wanted to. God, oh god he wanted to be hard right now, but if that wanton writhing body under his couldn't bring him up nothing could. Daniel's plumbing hadn't hit forty yet; it could still defy biology. His couldn't. "Takes me a little more than twenty minutes."

"I know. I know." Daniel shuddered, and went limp. "I'm just really high right now." _Just ignore whatever I say_ went unspoken. He made that sound again, the catch in his throat. Opened his mouth; then closed it, firmly. Closed his eyes.

Jack straightened his legs, carefully, reaching down to press on one of Daniel's thighs, try to ease him a little more closed. Daniel lowered both thighs, obedient, sighing.

Jack hadn't known it was possible to be this ragingly, painfully aroused without getting hard. The submission. How strongly Daniel responded to being held down. How his body did what Jack's told it to do, the thoughtless trust.

But Daniel had shut down. Cut off whatever he was going to blurt on the endorphin high. Jack said, "What did I say about talking to me?," and Daniel snorted softly and said, without opening his eyes, "Give me a break," and it was that, too -- stubborn Daniel, pigheaded Daniel, Daniel who _had_ been a terrific pain in the ass for years, Daniel who could afford to yield because he was the strongest soul Jack had ever known, but would always find some stupid place to dig his heels in.

"Come on, Daniel," Jack said. "We can do this. We can talk. It won't kill us."

"Yes to the fuck, no to the feelings," Daniel said softly. Mockery so deep and triple-edged that it killed all possible response.

_He'd known that Jack expected him to be the one to ream him out for keeping them in the dark when he pretended to go rogue. He'd been unsurprised when Jack stopped by his office, after the lame apology in the corridor, to invite the reaming, get it over with._

_"Short straw, huh?" Jack had said._

_Daniel hadn't smiled. Daniel's hadn't played._

_Daniel had risen, closed both doors, turned up the music on his CD player, and said, low and cold, "I made you, Jack. I rigged it so that it would be me who went to see you, because if you kept us in the dark it was probably for a good reason and if you were going to slip up better it should be to the team member who'd already figured it out. I could see from your face before that it was Hammond's call and you didn't like it but you had to back him up in public. I don't give a fuck about that. You do what you have to do. But if you ever, ever spew that kind of shit to Sam again, I will out you. I will stop waiting for you to sort it out with her yourself and I will give her the straight story, and don't play stupid and pretend you don't know what I mean. She's done nothing for five years but prove to you that gender is irrelevant to performance. She's done nothing but be an exemplary soldier -- soldier, not airman, you can shove your terminology. She's backed you up on every questionable military decision you've made. She has never undermined your authority and she has never blunted your edge. If you're pissed at me for emasculating you, you say it to me, Jack. Don't _ever_ do something like that to her again." Then he'd opened the doors, turned down the music, and sat back down to his work._

_Stunned but not humbled as far as Daniel could tell, Jack had tried to regroup by quipping, "Yes to the beer, no to the cover, huh?"_

_Daniel hadn't even ignored him. He'd looked up, slowly, and after a long, hard minute, Jack had backed away through the door._

_He suspected it was the first time Jack had ever backed away from anyone._

Jack lifted himself over Daniel's right leg and shifted to the side in a smear of come that sent a tingle through his skin. He drew his upper body back enough to pillow his head on a bent arm, but threw his leg across both of Daniel's, left his lower body tucked tight against his flank. Daniel inflated with air as the weight came off, then exhaled deeply. Drew his right arm down to flop over his ribs; left the other over his head, the way he flung it there sometimes in his sleep. His head rolled just slightly away from Jack. Jack breathed in the warm, familiar smell of his body, taking that much of Daniel inside him.

Daniel was still wearing his glasses. Technically, he still hadn't come to bed.

Jack understood why. Jack knew the line that would be crossed if the fuck ever met the feelings. Jack knew what crossing that line would cost.

He ran a finger along Daniel's appendectomy scar.

The skin around the scar twitched.

Daniel didn't say, _Don't_.

Daniel didn't point out that touching scars was a bad idea.

_Jack had rung his doorbell at ten o'clock the night they brought him back from Edora. Daniel let him in without a word. Got him a beer from the fridge -- a microbrew Jack had favored a couple of months before he was stranded, the fourth in the six-pack. A beer disappeared on each one of these visits. Soon he'd have to find out what Jack's new favorite brand was._

_Jack sat on the edge of his couch and wrapped himself around the beer. "I made a mistake. A bad one."_

_Daniel didn't answer. He stood near the window to the balcony, the lights of Colorado Springs spread like a blur of fallen stars beyond it. Mountains in the distance, unseeable in the cloudy night, past the glare of the town._

_"I drank. I shouldn't drink. Not hooch like that."_

_"You didn't drink it alone," Daniel said quietly, making the statement do double duty._

_"You don't know that."_

_Daniel didn't bother to respond._

_"She asked me to give her a child," Jack said. His eyes, fixed on the unsipped-from bottle in his hands, were dark, empty._

_"I know."_

_Jack looked up sharply._

_"When you were walking to the gate. After you said good-bye, when you didn't look back again. The way she rubbed her belly."_

_"She couldn't know. It wasn't even ten days ago ... "_

_"I didn't say she was pregnant. I'm saying she was thinking about it, hoping or fearing, and I'm saying that's how I know. That's all."_

_"I told her part of me would never let go of where I came from. What sort of cosmic bull is that? I didn't tell her. I didn't say it. I didn't say, 'And if I ever get the chance to go back, I will.'"_

_"Was that the mistake?"_

_"Sleeping with her was the mistake."_

_Daniel waited. He waited a long time._

_"Not holding out was the mistake."_

_Warmer._

_Jack let the bottle slide down through his fingers until it was dangling by the rim. The heel of his other hand pressed into his forehead. Head bowed, elbow digging into his bad knee. Daniel winced in sympathy, turned his face to hide it._

_"It was only three months. I knew. I knew it could take a ship a couple of years. But I couldn't stand it. Daniel ... "_

_"Jack." Softly. Waiting._

_"I gave up because it was easier than waiting."_

_Almost there._

_Through gritted teeth, voice tight, Jack said, "It was better than wasting a year, two years, five years, and no ship ever coming at all."_

_Yes._

_Daniel moved silently to the couch. Took Jack's beer, put it on a coaster on the low, square table, the one clear spot amid the clutter he'd accumulate every time he lived somewhere for a while, then slough off when he moved or died and start again with nothing, the nomad's oscillation of equity. His hip against Jack's hip, his thigh warm along Jack's thigh, he sat forward, the same way, his elbows on his knees. He'd long ago learned that being present, palpably present, was the only comfort that meant anything._

_"Carter saw it too, didn't she," Jack said. "That's why all the silence when we came back. She's pissed that I knocked the woman up and walked away."_

She's pissed that she killed herself to save you and you barely thanked her. Barely looked at her. _"No. She didn't see what I saw. She doesn't know. Did you put it in your report?"_

_"I haven't filed yet. I need a couple of days. No. I won't put that in. It's none of their business. I survived, I helped rebuild some stuff, I got rescued, end of story. One paragraph. One sentence."_

_"Then Sam won't ever know, unless you tell her."_

_"She finds out everything. She'll be pissed."_

_Daniel sighed. It wasn't for him to tell Jack what he'd seen on Sam's face when she flinched away from the sight of him hugging Laira good-bye, or what had clicked into place, with a painful jolt of guilt inside him, about Sam's behavior those three months. He'd kept Jack's secret. He'd keep Sam's, too. They didn't weigh much, lumped in with his own. Negligible by comparison._

_Even then, Daniel had thought his own burden was unique, and the one secret that would never come out._

"I need to wash off this KrazyGlue," Daniel said, and rolled up and off the bed.

_Next time I'll lick it off_, Jack thought, and got up, more slowly, to grab some spare washcloths. Daniel was mostly cleaned up when he came into the bathroom; he soaped, wiped, and rinsed himself while Daniel took a leak, then nudged him over and took a leak of his own before Daniel could flush, a small water-saving measure that he always figured scored him points with environmentalist guy. Daniel leaned on the doorjamb and said, "Do you even have lube?" As though continuing a conversation.

"Yeah, I jerk off with it." He was mildly surprised that Daniel didn't know that, then wasn't sure why he thought he should. "Guess the kid didn't leave that out with all the DVD boxes, huh?"

Daniel actually flashed a smile. "He probably put it away first thing, before he even noticed that he was thirty years younger."

Jack lathered gel onto his face and wet a razor, partly for something to do, partly because the light had shown a hint of beard burn on Daniel's upper lip. Daniel could claim he forgot to take his meds and got overzealous with the nose-mopping till the next batch kicked in. But not if he acquired more red patches. "How's he doing, by the way? You check up on that sometimes, right?"

"The reports say he's fine. Mostly stays out of trouble."

Jack had mostly been able to avoid thinking about the kid. About the second chance at youth, the second chance at everything. He mostly hadn't thought about the android version of him, either, for the same reasons, and he'd not-thought about it even harder since it was destroyed. He mostly didn't think about the infinity of hims running around in mirror universes, although now and then, when some issue came up regarding the mirror device, he put a firm kibosh on any tinkering and wondered whether it wasn't partly because somewhere, maybe lots of somewheres, there were other versions of him and other versions of Daniel whose situation would by implication out his own. But for the first time, he thought about the kid with a pang of pity instead of envy.

_God, he must miss you, Daniel._

If he died in a few days, the kid would still be out there. There was an odd sort of comfort in that. The kid out there, doing it right instead of wrong. Not letting Special Forces suck him in. Not putting the job before his family. But in three years, the kid would be twenty, and Daniel would be forty-two. Or forty-one; they'd never figured out if the ascended Ancients had aged him to compensate, or sent him back in the last healthy state he'd been in before he'd left. The kid would be twenty and gorgeous and he'd know it. In three years, if Jack lived, he'd be fifty, and scarred, and battered.

Jack's will directed that he be buried next to Charlie in the Winter Park plot. Daniel's directed that his ashes go to Abydos. Jack updated his will once a year. Daniel never had, and the last two times there hadn't been a body to dispose of.

Jack threw the razor into the basin and gripped the sides of the sink.

"Feeling a little Ancient?" Daniel asked, watching him carefully, not stepping in.

"It's not the stuff in my head. It's just the stuff in my head. Not a problem." He retrieved the razor, went back to shaving.

"We've handled more than most people ever handle and stay sane," Daniel said. Quietly. Still conversationally.

"Lube's in the nightstand," Jack said.

Daniel blinked once, slowly, and then disappeared into the darkened bedroom. Jack heard the drawer jar open on a hard tug. A little sticky. He should look at that sometime.

He left the soft light on over the mirror, flipped the overhead off, and went back into the bedroom. Daniel was propped against the headboard, a pillow behind his back, one leg bent up and one out straight, rotating the bottle in his fingers. He'd kicked the covers down. He'd taken his glasses off.

He looked up, so abruptly and so straight-on that it made Jack pause at the foot of the bed. "How do you want it, Jack?"

The direct question, from Daniel lounging naked and mussed against his headboard, brought him up so fast it actually embarrassed him. An image of Daniel flipped over, braced on that headboard, driving back into his thrusts, came unbidden and unstoppable. Daniel's eyes traveled down to take him in. From where he was standing, in the dark, he couldn't gauge their expression. His hand went to his dick. An impulse to cover it. An impulse to display it. He gave it a tug. Yeah. About as hard as it got these days.

There were a dozen ways he could answer the question by showing him. They would all be good; they would all be wrong. They would all be either him taking control of Daniel or begging Daniel, goading Daniel, to take control of him. He had to answer Daniel's way, by telling him.

"Not like this," he said. "Not on a dare. Not the way it was going to be before."

Slowly, eyes rising back to his face, Daniel said, "How was it going to be before?"

Jack kneed onto the mattress, just inside Daniel's extended leg. "It was going to be outside, not in here. Over the back of the chair in the living room. Over the dining-room table. Braced up against the kitchen sink." He took the bottle out of Daniel's hands. "It was going to be fast. Hard. To get it over with. To get it done and move on. That's how you thought it was going to be, isn't it?"

"That's what I thought I wanted."

Jack flipped up the cap. "Why?"

For a moment, Daniel didn't answer. Then, with no change of expression, he said, "Because I thought it was something you get out of your system. You. That that's what you do. That's how you do men. An aside, a tangent to the women you love and make love to, just a hot hard fast tight thing you need. Because I thought if you fucked me it might release the tension that's been garrotting us. Because I want you to take me and handle me and own me. Because I want you to welcome affection from me and I couldn't have that, because I want you to ask me to make love to you and I couldn't have that, because I want you to make love to me and I couldn't have that, because I want to pound my cock into your ass until you come so hard you black out and I couldn't have that, so I thought why not skip to the rest of what I want, I want you to push me down on the dining-room table and put my legs on your shoulders and fuck me deeper than you've ever gone into anyone else, I want that just as much and it's safe because there don't have to be any feelings, any admissions, so why not, you know, cut to the chase."

Jack dripped lube across trembling fingers. Within the stunned silence of intense arousal, he wondered if that would feel good. Terror and loss of control as a natural vibrator. Magic fingers. "Suppose you can have everything you want?" he asked, stroking lube onto himself. His penis looked bigger than usual, slightly alien. "Would that be a good way for it to be?"

Daniel took the lube, took Jack's hand off himself, squeezed more lube onto Jack's fingers, put Jack's fingers on his cock. Moved Jack's hand up and down, once, urging. Let go, and lubed his own fingers, and stroked them down slick onto Jack's cock. "No," he said, while he was doing those things. "It would get you fired and jeopardize the program and the planet and the galaxy and get my head busted by pissed-off homophobic airmen and break up the team and break Sam's heart."

"Well, sure." Jack drew his hand off Daniel's cock, now thoroughly slicked. "But aside from that," he said, taking the bottle. "Would that be a good way for it to be?" He covered his hand in lube and gave Daniel the bottle back.

"No," Daniel said, as Jack nudged the inside of his thigh, opening the leg that was drawn up at the knee. Daniel drew up the other leg and scooched down, curling his spine. "We're both on our third heart. Neither of us can afford to let this one break." He let go of Jack's cock, wiped his hand on the sheet, and reached under himself to spread his cheeks. When Jack's trembling fingers touched his anus, he let out a sound as though the heartbreak had just happened, just like that, just right then.

"Daniel ... " Jack stroked, felt a tremor; probed, and felt a shudder. He leaned forward, pressing his brow against Daniel's because his face came so close he might as well, and slid his middle finger up inside him.

"Oh," Daniel breathed.

Jack inhaled the exhalation. Daniel's breath was sweet. He could live on that, he thought. "My hand's shaking," he said. "Does that feel good?"

"Yuh. Yes." Daniel seemed almost incapable of speech.

"You're, uh ... I'm gonna put another ... "

"I do myself that way a lot. You don't have to be careful."

OK. Not incapable of speech then. Jack slid his forefinger in, too. The brow against his was hot, as with fever. "Daniel," he said, thrusting once, firm and trembling. Daniel responded with a gasp. "Danny - - suppose my third heart already broke. Suppose it broke when you left. You think you'd trust me with yours? You think we could share it?"

There was a silence, as though the planet had stopped, as though the only movement and sound left in the world were Daniel's heartbeat and the soft slippery sucking of Jack's fingers in his body. Then Daniel nosed down, angled under, caught Jack's lips up hard. Daniel's lips were dry, but Jack could feel the tears in them.

He let Daniel kiss him, tongue him; he moved his fingers in and out of him, fucking him slowly. Daniel writhed, intensely responsive. Jack didn't want to stop. But he did, drawing out and away and grabbing the bottle of lube to hold in front of Daniel. "Me now."

Daniel re-lubed his right hand, folded his legs under him, and came around Jack in an easy roll. Daniel's body was shaking. His chest came up against Jack's arm and shoulder; he put his left arm around Jack's waist and moved his hand around back, and under, sliding the dry side of his thumb over Jack's butt to let him know where the hand was. Jack lifted off his heels and reached under to spread himself the way Daniel had. Daniel buried his face in Jack's neck and stroked his fingers over Jack's asshole.

"Christ. Yes," Jack said, and realized he'd gritted his teeth. As he focused on relaxing, Daniel's finger breached the ring of muscle and curled down into him, and he trembled upward and blurted "Ah, fuck, _yeah_." Daniel rose with him, locked tight to him, and kept sliding in. His finger found the gland, stroked it; Jack wrenched his hands free, drove them gasping down between his legs, squeezed his cock and tugged his nuts hard to stop it, barely in time. "Daniel," he moaned, trying to tell him, wanting to tell him how incredible that felt, unable to communicate the wonder of the radiating ecstasy, wanting to share it.

Daniel's breath was hot on his neck. He murmured something and moved his finger a different way, corkscrewing it out and back in; Jack groaned, and kept groaning, helpless, as Daniel worked him with expert fingers, fingers that worked himself this way, fingers that knew what would feel good and what would open him enough to take a cock. He was half wild to feel it inside him by the time Daniel pulled three fingers slowly out and moved behind him, pushed him up.

"Sink down on me," Daniel said. "Don't come. Hold on to it. Don't come."

He jerked when the huge, slick head of Daniel's cock touched him. The tip nosed in, guided by Daniel's hand. Daniel's arm was around him to balance him. They poised there, trembling.

"Do it," Jack said. "Push."

"No. You control it."

"You've done this."

"Once. Badly. Sit down on me."

_Oh, god._ "Daniel ... ?"

"I don't know, Jack. I don't know if it will hurt. I don't think so. You felt open enough. If it hurts pull off."

"Daniel, dammit -- "

"Don't argue with me."

"_I'm not arguing, I'm begging_."

"Do you want this?"

"Yes."

"You want my dick inside you?"

"Yes, fuck, yes, yes -- "

"Then take it. Push down. I'll help. I'll push up. I'm holding it up for you. _Take it_."

With something that felt like a sob, Jack sank down. There was a pop, he'd felt that pop before through his cock, the muscle yielding, and then a burn of pressure, Daniel pushing, a huge slick blurring blunt sharp _spreading_ of his body, and it felt like velvet and it felt like bone and he pushed back and down to get more of it and Daniel pushed and he felt Daniel's face in his back felt his mouth open felt a graze of teeth heard a cry and he stopped, everything stopped except for the unbearable slow burn of pleasure. They seized there, trembling, panting; and then Jack sank down, down to where Daniel's fingers ringed himself tight, and the head of Daniel's cock touched his prostate, delved past it.

"Don't come don't come don't come," Daniel begged, closing his hand over Jack's fingers around his cock, squeezing hard.

"It's OK," Jack said, inanely, "it's good, just move, let -- yes -- oh _christ_ \-- "

"Jack I'm gonna -- I can't -- "

_So am I_. Jack pulled off, too fast, gasping. Twisted his body, turning around Daniel's where Daniel knelt panting in hitches and holding his own cock. Still hard; hadn't shot. Jack came up behind him, between his legs, used his whole body to push Daniel's up the bed, push him to arm's reach of the headboard.

"Hard," Daniel said, letting go of himself, leaning into the headboard. "One hard stroke."

"Won't hurt you," Jack said into his neck, fumbling himself into position, desperate. Desperate to come while he still felt the burn of Daniel's cock up the back of him. Desperate to penetrate, desperate to push himself into the tight slick heat where his fingers had been. _Slow down. Slow down. Slow down._

Over his shoulder, Daniel said, "_Do it_, Jack."

"Not like that." He leaned forward to stroke a hand over Daniel's left hand, which was braced so hard on the headboard that blood pressed out of the knuckles, whitening them. "Not you." He coaxed, then pried it away so that Daniel leaned down on one arm. Leaning forward pushed his cock between Daniel's legs, a slick lubed slide up under his balls, and both of them made a ragged sound. He leaned there with him for a minute, chest pressed against Daniel's back. He stroked Daniel's head, kissed hard into his shoulder. Was abruptly, dizzyingly aware of his body curled naked around Daniel's, the sexual position, _Daniel_.

"One stroke," Daniel said, head twisted around, breath hot on Jack's hair. The low voice resonated into Jack's chest. "All the way."

He might have nodded; he didn't know. He was pushing up, hands sliding on Daniel's back, reaching for a handhold between neck and shoulder. He positioned his dick with the other hand. His body knew this -- knew the angle, knew the motion, everything familiar, long practiced -- but as if the experience had been downloaded into him from a dream of another life. As though he'd never had sex before. The act felt completely new.

He pushed into Daniel's body on the burn left by Daniel's in his. He pulled Daniel's body onto him, gripping tight at shoulder and hip. One long, unbearable stroke into anguish and ecstasy.

Daniel cried out low and hoarse, his body clenching.

Jack groped down around him, every instinct to cover him, surround him.

Daniel's cry broke high and choked off, and he came.

The fist of muscle around Jack's cock squeezed, and Jack's hips jerked, thrusting him tight and close into Daniel's ass. Their bodies, locked together, bucked toward the headboard, and Jack felt the wood come under his fending hand, felt his nails gouge the lacquer at the top. Time stopped, one clear still wordless _i'm going to come_ suspended in empty space. Then his body broke open and poured into Daniel's. The ejaculations were muscular, powerful. They didn't stop. They sucked the inside of him out and kept going. His intestines would follow. His kidneys, his liver, his lungs. The dead rattling shattered place where his heart used to be. He locked his fisted arm around Daniel's ribs and held on tight.

His mouth opened but nothing came out. He groaned Daniel's name only when it started to pass.

Daniel's body had jerked hard when Jack shot. He was making a long, low sound now, like nothing Jack had ever heard from him. _No one ever came into him before_ skidded wordless through Jack's fractured consciousness as it began to reassemble. _Me, only me_. The sound Daniel was making tailed off. Small involuntary shudders ran up the back of them both, shivers of ecstasy. He was curled around Daniel, damp hair under his forehead, his face twisted down into Daniel's neck. Both of them were heaving. His left arm was bent against the headboard as if blocking a blow, keeping Daniel's head from hitting it. Daniel's forearm covered his right, up underneath. The pain in his right wrist and hand was his circulation cut off by Daniel's grip holding his arm in place. _He came it couldn't have hurt if he came like that_. His hand was getting numb. "Ease up," he managed. "I won't let go."

The second's delay told him that Daniel hadn't realized he was doing it. The grip relaxed abruptly and the arm dropped away. Their weight shifted, the mattress twanged as Daniel's right arm took some of the strain. "It's OK," Daniel said, with no inflection.

Jack wanted to urge him to straighten up, sit back on him, but he didn't have the strength.

"It's OK," Daniel said again. "Pull out."

Jack did, wincing at Daniel's shudder, and pushed off from the headboard, got awkwardly off him and around and onto his side. Daniel didn't move. His head was down. Jack couldn't see his face. "C'mere," Jack said. "Don't lie in the wet spot."

"More of a ... general area," Daniel said. "A zone."

Jack scooched to the side, making room, and Daniel kneed sideways and lowered himself to the mattress, facedown, hands over his head. What Daniel had said should have been funny. Maybe later it would be funny. Maybe later they'd laugh about it. How long since they laughed about anything? _I'm higher than a kite_, Jack thought. He didn't understand why he hurt. He'd expected Daniel to come into his arms. "Daniel ... "

"It's OK, Jack." Daniel's voice was muffled against the mattress. He moved his head slightly. "Really."

Jack laid his hand on that head. That priceless, precious fucking head. "Tell me I didn't hurt you."

Daniel turned his head to the side, cheek flat on the mattress. His eyes were closed. "Did I hurt _you_?"

"Not then. Aches now, some. Not in a bad way." He scrunched his fingers in the hair. "Daniel."

"It didn't hurt."

_It didn't hurt_. Not _You didn't hurt me_.

Jack started to speak, then closed his mouth.

"What do you want me to say, Jack?" Daniel asked quietly. Eyes closed. Body damp and limp, melted into the mattress. "That was great. You're great. You know you're great in bed. You don't need your ego stroked. I've never come that hard before. None of this should be a surprise." Before Jack could crack wise, he finished, "Wake me up when it's time to go."

Not good. Jack tried to joke it into submission. "You want to sleep till Monday morning?"

Daniel didn't answer.

"I meant everything I said, Daniel."

"I told you. It's OK."

"God fucking dammit." He shouldered down the bed so that his head was even with Daniel's. Kept a hand on him. "Don't pull this shit."

"I'm not copping an attitude, Jack." Daniel's voice was weary but calm. His eyes opened. They looked hollow. "I'm not trying to manipulate you. I just came really, really hard and I'm going to pass out in a second and I don't want you to do that protective thing and let me sleep past time. You don't have to protect me anymore. Not even from you."

"Somewhere you have to be tomorrow?"

Daniel closed his eyes again, tiredly. "No."

"Christ, Daniel." _I made him like this. That whole year. I taught him to be like this. I taught him to protect himself and he finally learned how_. "Don't you _get_ it yet?"

"Please don't do this." Daniel's voice was a whisper now. The shape of his soft, closed eyes was pain. "Go to sleep."

"That wasn't verbal foreplay, all that before."

A small, closemouthed smile this time. This one Jack would rather not have seen. "I did most of the talking."

That was it. He had. Jack hadn't volunteered any sexual history, just refrained from contradicting Daniel's guesses. Jack hadn't told Daniel what he wanted, just implied that it was possible that he might want the same. The only time in eight years that he'd ever come right out and explained himself with any degree of coherency was a lie, a mini-monologue produced for surveillance mics.

"Yeah," Jack said, and stroked his head. God, he was tired. Emotional stress made him stupid with fatigue. He was wrung-out from explosive sex. "Yeah. You did."

"So, sleep, OK?" A sigh went through Daniel, a deep rise and fall of his chest that he seemed unaware of. When he was about to go to sleep, when he was really finished with a meal, he'd expand and deflate with that I'm-done-now sigh.

"Don't go during the night," Jack said. "Swear to me."

"I won't go," Daniel said, slurring now. Sleep was taking him. "Swear."

Jack woke sprawled over him with no idea that he'd been falling asleep himself. Daniel had rolled onto his back during the night, migrated across the wet zone and to the other side of the bed. Jack had gone with him. He was holding him at the edge now. Maybe he'd driven him there, trying to get closer in his sleep. Overcompensating for all the times he'd slept beside him without being allowed to touch.

"Jack," Daniel said. Awake.

"Daniel."

"Almost dawn."

"I can see that." He stroked the smooth chest; stroked a nipple until it firmed.

Daniel's body contracted with a suppressed shiver. "Please don't do that unless you want to fuck again."

Jack reached down and smoothed a hand up over tight, hard balls and cock. "Unfinished business."

He could feel Daniel's surprise. So he hadn't thought Jack had liked that. Not enough to ever want to do it again. Not to want to come that way. _He really didn't believe anything I said_. "You don't want that, Jack."

"And you know this how?"

"You're very alpha. Very top."

"Not with you. Not only that." He was going to have to start somewhere. "I had this fantasy about you."

"Jack -- "

"I had a bunch of them. When you were gone. When I couldn't sleep. Mostly I'd imagine that I was spooned up behind you, like when you stayed here that time, only it was my hand on you, not yours, the way I wanted it to be back then. And no clothes. Just skin, just like this. Close. Sometimes I wouldn't even jerk off, wouldn't even come. I'd just pretend you had, in my hand, and I was still holding you. Then I could sleep. There was this thing that happened, with the replicators. I need to tell you about that sometime. It was bad. I thought I felt you that time. Really felt you, that breath of air when the room was completely still. Got me through that."

"I don't remember."

"I know. I know you remember more than you've told anybody, though."

"Some comes back. When it's ... triggered."

"In Nicaragua you remembered about when Baal had me."

"Yes. How did you know that?"

"I don't know. I just knew." He stroked -- balls, cock, then nipples. Then lips, when Daniel started to object again. "So listen. There was this one, this fantasy. It's kind of heavy, but it's important. I'm in this bed. Restraints, blindfold, gag. I wanted it to be your bed but your place was gone, cleared out, and it hurt too much to imagine it there, so it was here. Sofa cushion under my lower back, so I'm raised up pretty high. About as open and vulnerable as it gets. Exposed." He stroked a bead of precome into the tip of Daniel's cock. "Is this getting you hot?"

"You're describing a very powerful fantasy."

"Have you had this one?"

"No. In mine you don't need to tie me down."

"You liked it when I held you down."

"Yes." Daniel swallowed. "A lot." He licked his lips, turned his face away. "I like this too."

Jack stroked. "So I'm pretty much immobilized. I can make sounds but I can't talk. I can't see you. I can't give orders. I can't close my legs, I can't protect myself. I can't even help by, you know, thrusting. Moving. I'm so hard my cock's sticking straight up in the air. You put a cock ring on it. Another restraint. I can't shoot until you let me. I can't see, so I don't know what you're going to do until I feel it. I want you to talk to me. I love it when you talk to me. I miss your voice. You could make me come by just saying my name. But you don't. You work your hand up and down on me until I've come two or three times. Then you fuck me."

"No prep?" Daniel said, and Jack could just see the edge of his smile. "That's ... inconsiderate."

"I don't need it. It's a fantasy. You're lubed. I can just about take it, the first time. You pump hard and you come and then you're gone for a while. I'm just lying there, dying for it. Eventually you come back. It's slow the next time. Lasts forever. Till I'm begging. You jerk me again at the end of it, so that I come with you, but you still won't let me shoot. Same thing; you go, you come back. Third time's so hard the whole bed shakes, and you pump me through lube and pop the ring off and order me to come, first thing you've said to me the whole time, and I cream the whole place while you're shooting into me, and that's it." He stroked a little faster, dipping down and around. Daniel's right leg cocked wide to give him access. "Are you getting this?"

"What are you doing while you're having this fantasy?"

"Just having it. 'Til the end. Then I jerk off and come."

"On your back?"

"Yes."

"Pillow under your hips? Fingers inside you?"

"Nope. It's mostly a mindfuck, just the orgasm at the end. Are you getting this, Daniel?"

"Sure. Abdication of responsibility. Inability to give orders. Loss of control. Reenactment of a position you were in when you were tortured, only it's pleasure. That's a coping fantasy. Catharsis. I hope you screamed sometimes. You never screamed when ... " He blinked, closed his mouth.

_When Baal tortured me_. "Are you getting that it's about you? That it could only be about you?"

"You're trying to tell me you trust me."

"Yes. And that I want you on top. Well, I'm also trying to turn you on."

"That's working."

"Yeah, I can see that. You know what sucks about that fantasy? You know why I hardly ever indulged in it?"

"I keep leaving you."

"You come back two times. But once I come, really come, you go. You undo the restraints; by the time I can move my arms and get the gag and the blindfold off, you're gone. All I want is to imagine you're there. But I can't, because you're not, and in that fantasy I can't even pretend."

"Is this something you want to have happen to you in reality?"

"Sure. If you'd get off on it. I'd get off very hard on something like that. But not the leaving part. OK?"

"I don't want to leave, Jack."

"You thought I'd fuck you and throw you out."

"I thought that might be all you needed."

"I need sex, Daniel. I've needed sex for years. But what I want is you. Next to me. With me. Reading, working, talking on the phone to people you actually like, watching some interminable crap on TV, I don't care. I can't ... I can't explain this, I don't have words for it, words are your thing. All I could do yesterday was say yes. Yes, you pretty much nailed where I'm coming from sexually. Yes, everything you said you wanted, that's what I want. Yes to all of it. Yes to everything but the part where I wake you up so you can leave. Yes to everything but the part where it's only women I love or ... make ... love to. I only loved one other person in my life. I did a crappy job of it." He closed his eyes. It was too much. He'd done his best. "Can you just do that thing where you understand what I'm saying even though I can't say it?"

"Yeah. I can do that, Jack." Daniel turned to him. "You've been saying it for eight years. Some translations take me longer than others." He took Jack by the jaw. Ran his thumb over Jack's lips; slid it between, forcing it into Jack's mouth. Jack's eyes slid closed. He sucked. Salt and old lube and semen, he didn't know whose. Daniel slotted his erection in next to Jack's. Moved his hand down, grasped them both, squeezed. "If you don't like something, will you tell me? Not just take it because you think it's what I have to have?"

Jack eyes fluttered open. "Yeah. OK."

Daniel rolled him onto his back. He was heavy. Wonderfully, blessedly heavy, all dense muscle and weight. His hips ground down into Jack's. The pressure of two cocks trapped against his body was strange, exquisite. "I want to fuck you," Daniel said. "Do you want that?"

"Yes."

"Now?" Daniel said.

"Now."

Daniel reached up behind him, under the pillow. He must have woken up at some point, stashed the lube there. "Like this? On your back?"

"Yeah." As Daniel pushed off and knelt back to slick up, Jack reached around, raised his legs, grabbed hold behind his knees. "Will it work like this?"

"I don't know, I've never done it." Daniel paused, looking at Jack, coloring slightly as he looked between Jack's legs. "We'll try." He stroked the backs of his knuckles up the soft skin of Jack's inner thigh. He watched the effect. Jack flushed hot, watching Daniel watch the effect. Suddenly the weirdness of exposure was gone, and the unpleasant vulnerability of holding his legs up and open wasn't unpleasant anymore.

Daniel finished with himself and held the bottle up over Jack's balls and squeezed, moving it from side to side. Cool, delicious lube ran down the creases of Jack's thighs and down into the crack of Jack's ass and whispered over his asshole. Twinging pleasure contracted his body from balls to throat.

"You like it cold," Daniel said, setting the bottle aside. He shifted up and forward, took himself in his hand. Rubbed the lube into Jack with the head of his dick.

Jack groaned a sound somewhere between affirmative and overwhelmed. He pulled his legs higher, wider. Didn't care how stupid he looked now, wasn't thinking about how feminine and unfamiliar the position felt, just wanted the rest of that dick up in him again. Slower this time, longer. Wanted to come on it.

Daniel leaned over him, braced on one arm, repositioned himself. "OK?" he said, softly, holding Jack's gaze.

"Yeah," Jack whispered.

Daniel pushed in, his lips parting, his eyes creasing.

The sense of penetration was intense. More astonishing than last night. Jack gasped, blinking. Daniel said "OK?" and Jack said, "Yeah, yeah," then groaned, feeling Daniel's dick work up inside him. His ass contracted a little, reflexively, and he gave a slight push to try to open it, and that helped Daniel work in farther. "Good," Jack said, breathlessly, "good, good," and then it _was_ good, it was _really_ good --

Daniel was still controlling it with his hand. The tilt of his body, the angle of his shoulder, the muscle in his arm, the chest and abs leading down to the shadowy place between Jack's legs where their bodies joined -- it was overwhelmingly sexual, overwhelmingly male. Jack stopped trying to look and let his head fall back.

"More," he groaned. "All the way. It's good, Daniel."

Daniel let go of himself and wrapped his arms around Jack's legs and pressed until Jack was filled and their bodies were flush, muscle on bone, skin on skin. Jack's hands fell to either side and clawed the sheets as if he could pull himself down the bed, straining closer still. The pressure in him swelled outward, a throbbing pleasure. When Daniel moved, just a little, it doubled.

"Oh, fuck, _yeah_," Jack groaned.

Daniel rocked in him, slowly. Rocking their bodies, locked tight. Wiry pubic hair rubbed Jack's balls with every push, a scratchy accidental stimulation that drove him half wild inside the hypnotic gentleness of Daniel's control of his body. He groaned through his teeth. He had to come. He had to come so _fucking_ badly.

"Almost there," Daniel said. His voice was shaky. "I can't hold on too much longer. I want you to come on me while I'm still hard."

"Touch me," Jack groaned.

"I can't reach." Daniel hugged Jack's legs closer, pressed tighter, deeper. "I don't want to let go. Touch yourself. Let me see."

Jack was coming almost before he got his hand onto himself, because Daniel wanted to see him touch himself.

He jerked fast, light, into the first spurts, just thumb and two fingers, the orgasm a sharp twinge up from his balls. Then he really came -- ass spasming around the thick pressure of dick inside it, muscle contractions squeezing his prostate. His vision whited out. He slammed the bed with his left hand, fisted himself convulsively with his right, pumping hard, his own groan tearing his throat. With Daniel's dick in him, the orgasm fed back into itself. He came harder and harder. For a terrifying second he thought he felt his own heart stop, and his eyes flew open and he groped for Daniel. He focused on Daniel's shocked eyes, barely. Uncontrollable shakes jerked his body. Daniel crushed him tight, trying to help him hang on.

"OK, I'm OK," he gasped, the way you did when you took a bad spill or a hit, when you knew you'd scared the crap out of the people around you. "I'm OK, Daniel ... ahhh, _gnnnnnggh_ ... " His head fell back; he lost all voluntary muscle control. Even ebbing, the pleasure was unbelievable.

"Jack I'm coming," Daniel said in a rising rush, and then shoved hard with his hips, twice, and burst with a low sob.

Jack felt him shoot, from inside. Up deep inside. It was astonishing. It was _fantastic_. The muted spasms massaged him. He imagined he could feel the fluid filling him, soaking him inside. Daniel quaked against his thighs and ass. His hands curled into fists so he wouldn't gouge Jack with his nails. He was gasping, a hoarse keening threading through it, as though there wasn't enough power in the human vocal cords to voice what was happening to his body.

When it was over, Daniel came out in a wet slide and collapsed down into Jack's arms. Jack wrapped legs and arms around him, and Daniel went limp, still letting out small moany breaths.

The room had gone from blue to rosy gold in the first light of day. Jack lay blanketed in Daniel, limbs draped around him. His breathing was shallow; Daniel was heavy. When Daniel made a muddled effort to shift away, Jack tightened his arms and legs, and Daniel yielded, sinking into him even more deeply, the mattress giving under the combined weight. Jack liked a soft bedspring. He slept on enough hard surfaces. He was glad for that now, for the enfolding comfort.

After a while, he felt something like laughter bubble through Daniel's body, a delicious warm vibration. "What?" he smiled into damp hair, and lifted his hand to stroke his fingers through it.

"I can't believe we had sex," Daniel said, after a second.

"Too weird, huh," Jack said by way of agreement, and nuzzled into the dampness, combed through it.

"I can't believe _I_ had sex."

"Long time, huh?" This time the "huh" was more of a question.

"Very long time," Daniel said. "Very, very long time."

"Whole seven, eight hours," Jack said, a low teasing.

"That was different."

"Yeah. I know. I know." Jack closed his eyes. "So was this."

"Yeah." After a while, Daniel said, "Are you going to sleep?"

"No. Are you?"

"No. I just woke up."

Jack drew his head back in surprised realization. "You did me before coffee."

"Yes, I did."

"You don't do _anything_ before coffee."

"Apparently there's one exception." Daniel pushed up enough to turn his head and settle back in, face against Jack's ear.

"I've single-handedly cured PCS."

"Eureka," Daniel said, and then didn't quite kiss his neck.

"You can kiss me, Daniel."

Daniel laid a soft, tentative kiss on the throb of artery in Jack's throat. "You know you completely freaked me out when you did that last night."

"When I bit you?" Jack said, pretending to misunderstand.

"Uh, noooo ... but that was ... Are you trying to get me hard again?"

"When I kissed you on the mouth."

"Yes."

Jack turned his head, and brushed Daniel's chin with his fingertips, and laid a soft kiss on his lips, so there wouldn't be any mistake. "Years I've wanted to do that. _Years_."

"That was probably the last thing in the world I'd have expected you to do."

"You thought I'd take up ballet before I'd kiss you on the mouth?"

"Yes, actually."

Jack rolled them onto their sides, drew Daniel against him the way he'd draw a lover, and kissed him again, gently and thoroughly, and then again after a breath, a soft slide of lips and tongue, tender and caressing. He kept his eyes open. He threaded his fingers through the tousle of hair. He wanted this absolutely crystal clear. He drew back, then kissed him again, because Daniel was so fucking beautiful, because he couldn't have gotten it up again if his life depended on it but all he wanted was to make love to him. "Any questions?" he said, softly, against the soft full lips.

Daniel didn't answer right away. Jack drew back a little to look at him. There was no question of what he was seeing on Daniel's face. Open, unguarded adoration. In his wildest dreams he'd never have imagined seeing that look directed at him.

"No questions," Daniel said. Then he smiled, dazzlingly. "OK, one question. Who's making me coffee?"


End file.
